[conspire] Christian draws out a Sun Microsystems guy

Tony Godshall togo at of.net
Mon May 2 14:45:44 PDT 2005


According to Rick Moen,
> Quoting Tony Godshall (togo at of.net):
> 
> > So what do you think, Rick?  Will they fork?  
> 
> The funny thing is:  Many packages in distributions are _somewhat_ in a
> state of forkage from upstream, all the time.  Mozilla Navigator and
> Firefox, for example, tend to have some fairly extensive distro-applied
> improvements.  This is suboptimal, but is just the way things work out.
> 
> There also tends to be, at minimum, some minor ongoing forkage to make
> packages comply with local distro-specific policies about where files
> go, how packaging works, etc.
> 
> Anyhow, at minimum, the Debian OO.o packagers already have gotten used
> to re-doing some parts of OO.o 1.x that relied on Sun's proprietary JRE
> -- not necessarily out of any aversion to that JRE, but rather so that
> OO.o could go into Debian's "main" collection rather than the "contrib"
> or "non-free" ones.  So, that's likely to continue.  I have no clear
> idea how many other distributions will join them.  It would be a good
> idea for them to do so.

One thing I do wish was that Debian package descriptions
were just a little bit longer and included a consise description 
as to what functional differences there are between the upstream 
version and the debianized package.  It's frustrating to
hear about these things in a by-the-way form.  I mean I'll
still use the Debian package, but it'd be nice to know when
I install something generally what features have been removed or
added (and doesn't make me sound like a dummy when I talk to
non-Debian folks- "Oh, Openoffice does /what/?").





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